HAZARDOUS WASTE 'OUT OF CONTROL' AT DISNEY WORLD

ORLANDO -- Walt Disney World's handling of hazardous waste is "completely out of control" and has "major potential for harm" to human health and the environment, a Florida state agency says.

The Department of Environmental Regulation told the company this week that it will be fined $174,399 for seriously violating hazardous-waste regulations. The penalty is the largest ever imposed by the DER's Central Florida district, which covers eight counties.

A two-day inspection of Disney's 43-square-mile park in January uncovered nine violations, seven of them "major." Concerned that groundwater might be contaminated by spilled or leaked hazardous waste, the DER wants Disney to test groundwater in two of the nine areas inspected.

Disney received a warning notice on Wednesday, outlining the violations in an inch-thick inspection report. The notice listed a dozen corrections that Disney must make. Several pages of photographs in the report showed steel drums, many rusty and unlabeled, some lying on their sides.

"We have done our best to comply with DER regulations. We will certainly continue to and if there are things that need to be corrected, I have every confidence that we will," John Dreyer, a Walt Disney World spokesman, said.

Disney has 10 days to meet with the regulatory agency to plan a schedule for correcting its violations and to negotiate its penalty. Penalties could be reduced if Disney showed that it did not violate certain regulations or that its violations were not as serious as DER contended. It could take Disney several months to several years to make the dozen corrections requested by DER, said George Gionis, enforcement section manager for DER's Central Florida district.

At Walt Disney World and Epcot Center, the fiberglass trees, the meticulous landscaping, the elaborate props, the crisp costumes and the fleet of boats and trams are not created by the wave of a fairy's wand. It takes hazardous solvents and resins to create fiberglass trees, pesticides and insecticides to keep shrubbery healthy, toxic paints and solvents to decorate props, detergents and solvents to clean costumes, oil to keep boats and trams running.

"Based on our inspection, it looks as if they (Disney) do not have good control of their hazardous waste," Gionis said.

Some of the most serious violations were reported in the Epcot Center maintenance yard, behind the China pavilion. DER described the yard as an "uncontrolled, unsupervised, unmanaged and unposted site."

This is what the state inspector saw: Steel drums stored "indiscriminately' ' and filled with waste such as resins, solvents, coolants, paints and unidentified chemicals. Many drums were unlabeled, rusty, open or lying on their sides.

Hazardous waste, leaking or spilling from drums, appeared to have run off a concrete slab and onto the ground, where it could contaminate groundwater.

No emergency response or spill cleanup equipment was at the site, and no precautions were taken to guard against fires, explosions or spills. Storing incompatible wastes next to each other -- easy to do when the material is not labeled -- can cause fires and explosions. That and the the potential for spills and groundwater contamination, "could threaten human health or the environment," the report said.

"This site is completely out of control," the inspector reported.

Disney has failed to give proper training to employees who handle hazardous waste, the report said. Only one employee -- a laborer -- has been trained.

One of a dozen actions that the DER is asking Disney to take is to develop an employee training course about hazardous-waste management. The report makes no mention of a threat to theme park guests.